A Matter of Grace
January 20, 2020

     I was raised in a Southern Baptist church.  This was in the days before large swaths of theologically conservative evangelicals traded in the teachings of Jesus for the power of contemporary political conservatism.  The tide was turning during my teenage years (even before), but it happened slowly enough that I was able to experience what community centered on the Jesus of the Gospels felt like.  It was good, mostly – good enough to make my estrangement from the faith community of my childhood a long, drawn-out affair.

     One of the lessons was this: grace is the unmerited favor of God.  It is unmerited in the sense that there is nothing you can do to earn it.  You can't deserve it or work toward it.  The most you can do is put yourself in its path, and even that's debatable.  The concept of grace was usually contrasted with mercy, the shorthand definition of which was the withholding of some deserved punishment.  "The wages of sin is death," we read in the letter to the Romans, "but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."  The Son gives life.  This is grace.

 * * *

     My life bears the marks of grace.  I've been dealt some good cards: a few extra IQ points than the average bear, the generosity of scholarship donors at the schools where I earned my degrees, the efforts of legions of women in the decades before my birth to clear paths for my education and expression of my gifts despite my lack of a Y chromosome.  

     I hold some lesser cards as well, and maybe my hand is incomplete.  Some might argue that I should give myself credit for how I've played my hand, all things considered.  Perhaps, but that too may be a matter of grace.